Game announcement: Galactic Conquest

[code_man]

Hello, i finally got around being arsed to make an official introduction for my game titled Galactic Conquest.

Some of you might have seen the tank screens already in the 2015 wip thread, which were really the first public shots.
Originally i planed to do it after a finish my C&C game, but i just couldnt wait and started some time ago.

The game takes place in a modern to futuristic setting about 150 years from now on diverse planets.
There are 3 planned factions, each very different from the other requiring players to understand their strenghts and weaknesses in order to win.
Unlike most spring games the units are larger and fewer are available both in numbers and different unit types aswell as fewer basebuilding.
Management of individual units and utilization of terrain will be very important in order win battles.
Gameplay will be fastplaced and fairly dynamic with very many strategies that one can use from a early point.
All units and structures are designed to be somewhat obvious to their purpose but also having a variaty of possibly overlapping roles, but each unit will be different in how they fullfill their role.
The game makes heavy use of upgrades and customizations allowing units to be altered in diverse ways to adapt quickly to combat needs.
Economy uses a fairly simple model, currently mexes and poweplants are used in the same way as TA, however each faction will use resources a bit differently.
The game uses a somewhat simple or oldschool unit and structure design model but the gameplay itself is a bit experimental in some ways.

Depending on how things go i hope i can make a release with one faction and most of its units complete once the next version of spring comes out.
Gameplay and unit design for one faction is nearing a optimum so should be mostly detail work, and if the new engine plays along nicely there should be no stopping me.
Hope if i dont stay lazy il make a moddb page to post further infos.

Storyline is still WIP but here is excerpt from the storyline, introducing the first and currently only faction in the game:

Spartans:
In 2087 starting as a small mercenary company, the spartan corporation were mostly defending smaller mining and trade posts in the outer colonies.
The outer colonies were like a wild west in space, full with pirate bands, treasure hunters, mercenaries, greedy miners and rengados that only lived to see the next day.
Conditions too hostile to allow a safe stable life, dangerous natural environments and hostile life forms were only lesser concerns in those places.
Instable and ever changing, the outer colonies were a hostile place, where the central authorites were not willing to reach out.
With a much more primitve level of technology than the central colonies, high tech was considered wasted in such a harsh environment, as was BRAIN powerless to effectively govern such a place.
It was also a good place to dispose of unliked social elements for the goverments inside the central colonies.
Using the resources they aquired the spartans also procured the means to fabricate weapons which had allowed them to grow to sizeable military force with only minor exterior dependance.
The main advantage of the spartan army was their preferance to use well trained humans rather than drones both remotely operated and autonmous ones.
While drones both cheap and highly advanced ones were very common and used among militaries and industries as well as outlaws alike.
The cheap drones in many cases exhibited behaviour to turn on their owners, even without being hacked and the expensive autonomous drone networks used by some factions proved very tedious to manage.
In many cases hostile conditions proved communications and sensors problematic makeing drones often only viable as support units, in extreme cases a high liability.
By 2095 the spartans were not the largest military force in the outer colonies but the best equiped and trained.
Their adaptability and speed gave them the edge over other forces.
Tough human cloning has been outlawed in 2045, since the masacre in south east asia, in the island war by rebeling clone soldiers in the that nearly manged to overthrow the local goverments and killed large portions of the population.
Followed by large unrests troughout the world that did considerable damage for years.
While many have tried comming up with viable commercial schemes to utilize cloning aswell as cybernetics in diverse forms, all of them had proven little success of which most had died in the conceptional phase.
Some had made into a practical phase tough, often were the resources needed to provide a proper environment for such experimentation unavailable and often failed.
However other more ambitious projects failed terribly with their financial aspects being the least concern for those involved.
2105 the spartans relentless success lead the executives to came up with a grand scheme, they mastered all weapons and tactics, except one: the human element.
So they tried to generate a clone army hidden from the eyes of the rest of the galaxy, project herkules as it was called.
By 2115 they suceeded, generating a streamlined program to produce supersoldiers efficiently.
Spartan troopers are genetic engineered to be perfect soldiers, autonomous and smart, yet lacking any human weakness and obediant.
Tough they are designed to be incapable of questioning their own existence certain rare anomalous malfunctions in units have been noted.
Devoid of fear or compasion or any other perception that would deviate them from their objectives, the spartans were the best fighting force in the history of mankind true to their namegivers.
By 2132 with the total collapse of the central colonies and their authorities by BRAIN and countless wars that followed because of the power vacuum, the outer collonies were in total dissarray and so was the spartan economy.
Whatever actual human elements were still in charge of the sparatan corporation decided to split up their power and turned on one another, the spartan military heads, that were supersoldiers, had no choice but to take command by killing their human commanders.
The anticipated BRAIN attack however had never happened, instead the power struggles of whatever had not been decimated took its own toll decades to follow.
Ever since the spartans had attempted to secure and control the galaxy and its resources to rebuild their empire, for the sake of itself.

And no thread would be complete without some candy for the eyes.

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Still no textures, but il get that fixed soon hopefully.

[raaar]

red and blue candy.

do they taste like gummy bears?

btw, spell checker

[imboss77]

This looks pretty cool (and tasty I might add)!

[PicassoCT]

So less base building, more action. Sounds good. :)
Also looks promising (sing to jks Window maybee he will throw the metall shadder code down )

[Karl]

Nice Army Men RTS like game you've got there

[code_man]

A bit late as usually.

Anway, yeah i rushed the story a bit, but should be roughly like you can imagine from it, il improve it later on.

Im really close to getting round to making textures, but so far its been way more complicated than i tought and well things always get in the way.
Those textures are just placeholder files and help me view the ingame geometry better.
I have a rough draft of the main texture piece of all spartan units, which basicly is a black and white digital camo that will take on the player color.
All spartan units and structures will have this applied minus the detail parts such as optics and weapon parts and will add some insignia and numbers.

[darklord42]

Not that it's really a problem, but just so you know, there is an old starwars battlefield 1942 mod by the same name.

[code_man]

I worked rather hard on this recently, still much work to do and the engine also doesnt cooperate on my terms yet, but its sure coming along.
The uvmap problem is still not fixed but i did make advancements, i hope that finally this time around il be able to texture my stuff.

I decided to disclose some information here and try to keep this up and maybe stick it to a guide together.

First it must be noted that each faction will have drastically different mechanics in terms of gameplay.
Since only the spartan faction is yet designed and almost basically implemented i will only explain for this faction, the other factions will be disclosed after the initial release.

Spartan Corporation Information
As you can tell from the screenshots the spartans generally are a early 21st century style military, utilizing units and mechanics that should be generally obvious to most players.
Their units are generally quite strong, with a good combination of armor and firepower.
The structures of the spartans are however not very strong but somewhat expensive and not particularly good at providing good bonuses.
This leaves them at an economic disadvantage in general.

However their achilles heel is the fact that their units require fuel and ammunition to function, coupled with the fact that they are somewhat slow means that in order to mount a effective assualt they have to expend linearly.
Otherwise they are in danger of getting cut off and destroyed.
Another aspect is that spartan units have slow movement and weapon turn rate, which means flanking attacks can be very effective.
In a spartan vs spartan engagement the one who can outmanouver the other will win, otherwise if both attack frontally it will be a stalemate.

Ofcourse spartans do not only can do brute force attacks but also have a few unit options to sneak in infantry to wreak havoc behind enemy lines, so players can wreck the enemies base and seriously setback any enemy economy.

To sum it up: spartans have very strong frontal units, but if flanked properly can easly be pushed back.

Insertion
Spartan players start with two Amphibious builders, one small supply pickup and a scout car, along with five infantrymen that can be loaded on to the car and a commander vehicle.
The commander, unlinke the rest of the forces is slow and not amphbious, however with its sensors and armor it makes an excellent early base defender against rushes.
Despite this spartan players have the luxury of making many opening moves, such as expand forward, or rush to factories or buildup a economy before attempting to build up a force and more, and combinations thereof.
This makes players very unconfined to their initial start positions, especially when water is involved they can expand to islands that are inaccessable to heavy units.
But since the vehicles use fuel, players do not have all the time in the world and must be decisive as to setup a fuel refinery early.
They can also rush the enemy with their troops, but this is highly risky and leaves the one who fails a rush highly vulnerable, in particular if the commander picks em off.

Another sumup: Spartans have a multitude of strategical choices at their disposal right at gamestart.

Thats if for now, i hope i can make more such little details available soon, as the game has many minor and larger mechanics that all together make it a very innovative game.

[Silentwings]

With the space part of the theme, in case you didn't know of them already, you might make use of http://springfiles.com/spring/spring-maps/apophis and http://springfiles.com/spring/spring-maps/tma-0-0

[code_man]

Ive been busy again, not as busy as last time but non the less made some good and important progress.

Il drop in another two bits of information to the game, nothing very interesting but important still.

I should probably post some screenshots some day, they have no textures still, but the geometry has been improved.

Once again currently all this information applies only to spartans.
Economy
The economy uses mostly the oldschool model from most spring games which i think everyone should be familiar with.
That is everything costs minerals, those are extracted by mineral extraction mines structures that should be built on metal spots placed on the map.
Mineral drilling mines are somewhat cheap and somewhat ok armor, but can take a while to build.
However in order to function they need fuel, fuel is used by all vehicles and some structures too so players need to weight out their expenses or their economy collapses.
Fuel is generated from oil refineries that can be placed anywhere, those are small, cheap, have low armor and produce a good amount unconditionally, so one can place many of these at once.
Another way to gain fuel is to place a oil drilling station on special spots on the maps called geovents, this structure produced significantly more fuel and has more armor, but the price and build time is fairly similar to the regular one.
Storing these resources is also similar to the known way, as in you need storage structures to store these efficiently.
One more slightly obscure fact is that while fuel storages are often specific to store fuel, storages that can store minerals can in most cases also store some fuel.
Besides the purely economic structures, certain support structures also can store smaller amount of these.
As i have already hinted fuel and minerals are not only for building units, but also must be available to actively maintain units, but that will be discussed more in detail another time.

Personally i feel these mechanics lack some depth and hope to revise these in the future, but that is yet far from the horizon.
summary: The old simple ta resources aquisition and storage mechanics apply, fuel is almost free, but minerals need to be fought over.

Structures And Construction
The next logical point of explaination would be how bases should be made.
As the gameplay itself is a conventional rts by design you can expect structures to be built by builders for resources.
Your builders are armored vehicles that are amphibious and can repair other units too, at game start you have two so.
Since these vehicles can assist each other one can chose between faster building individually or spreading out workforce.
Their basic structures are cheap, generic, small and low armored generally.
The available structures are mostly economic ones, one "factory" (this will be explained in a separate chapter), specialized support structures for individual unit types and ofcourse some simple defensive ones.
For the the time being the only hightech structure is the command headquarters, it is a highly expensive and huge building.
Its primary purpose is to unlock hightech units, structures, upgrades and support powers.
It also has other perks, the first one being its imensive health, plus its large los and radar, it is also equiped with four seperate defensive laser turrets and last but not least it can house one tank in it that benefits from its host structures health.
The command headquarters is a huge investement, but also a high risk as it takes long to build and drains many resources and there can be only such structure.
As such the placement of this structure is of strategic importance, as it must be placed in a safe area but never the less someplace where it can be of defensive value.
It is planned that hightech structures will be implemented that provide large bonuses at high buildcost and buildtime.
Given the builder mobility it is fairly possible to create scattered outposts across strategic locations to maximize local defensive and offensive spots.
summary: Building is classical too and low tech structures are nothing special. So spartan bases are often spartanic.

Stay tuned for the next episode, maybe il even be arsed to show some pictures.

[code_man]

Gotta keep going at it while i still have some energy left.

I worked on it quite a bit, but its getting tough.
I worked out most things, eliminated most mundane work and now i work on the problematic parts and have to fight the engine and other problems too.
The uvmap and texture situation hasnt improved in a solid way, but im getting there.
Not going to post screenshots this time sadly.

So i think the last two posts give a good reflection of what to expect of this game when you would start it and somewhat overall how things roughly work.
But galactic conquest is intended to be a game where small things matter and managing individual units is important, in contrast to other games where you attack with large groups.
So this time around il be talking about some combat units and their mechanics.
Spartan unit types
There are five base categories in which units can be divided, we go trough each one.

• The first category is infantry.
  As in most games infantry are cheap and have little armor and firepower, compared to other units that is.
  They are however not meant as cannon fodder, rather as special forces type units to attack enemy positions from the flank or in conjunction with armored vehicles to counter other infantry.
  In particular while they have relatively slow movement speed, their ability to move effectively in difficult terrain and use that terrain as ambush spot is their most important aspect.
  Infantry also does not suffer from having to adjust themeselfs to the direction of enemy units in order to fire effectively.
  Another aspect is that they do not show up on radar and can be used for stealthy cover operations behind enemy lines.
  Infantry are armed with a diverse arsenal of weapons, including grenade and missile launchers that can combat vehicles and aircraft.
  The have little health, but are small and thus not so easy to hit, but it is not recommended using them in the open.
  In addition, some units and structures can house infantry and that can be deployed quickly when enemies approach, some particular ones even allow infantry to fire out from said unit, which can be a very deadly tactic.
  Last but not least infantry do not require fuel to operate and hence can be vital incase your fuel reserves are low.
  This will hopefully make infantry important assets in augmenting your main forces rather than cheap cannon fodder.
• Light vehicles is next.
  The light vehicle class consist of units that serve mostly as support for others, non the less they can do some damage.
  In general they have great mobility, while they cannot match the climbing ability of infantry, they are faster than most other types of units on the ground.
  Obviously their armor is not great so they are generally not suitable for direct combat and should retreat when enemies close in.
  In most cases their role is either for transportation for other units in different variaties.
• I like big tanks and i cannot lie...!
  Lets get to the fun part, everyone like tanks right? right!
  Tanks are the main combat unit type for the spartans, they are fairly conventional tanks as we have today, so no really fancy bizzareties.
  They are not very versatile as other unit types and rely on their unmatched combination of firepower and armor.
  While they are highly dangerous to face headon they are vulnerable from the flanks, even by infantry.
  Due to their lack of speed and line of sight they are also in danger of being shelled by artillery or picked off by aircraft, when not equiped with anti air.
  Despite tanks being by design a bruteforce weapon for straight attacks they come in different variations and specialties where each one is more suitable against certain types of targets and feature a different degree of mobility.
  Thus even heavier tanks can be taken down by lighter ones if manouvered correctly and the heavier tank is not covered properly.
  Even tough almost all tanks are by design conventional, each one will have slightly different weapons and abilities to make every one a specialized weapon.
• Next up are aircraft.
  As in other games aircraft are fast but weak armored, but not hindered by terrain.
  They come in different categories too, from light scout aircraft to heavy bombers and all the stuff in between.
  Most units cannot engage aircraft, but some can and the dedicated anti air units excel at this.
  Like all other units they need fuel and ammo to function, which they can get at airpads.
  There isnt much to say here, their main perk is that they can only be stopped by certain units, so if a player lacks anti-air you can pick off his force easly.
• Last but not least are the ships.
  Since the oceans are wide open ships do not have any terrain considerations, combat is dictated by firepower, armor and their manouverablity.
  As with all unit types there will be different ones for different threats, such as anti-air and anti-ship units, aswell long range anti-ground cruisers.
  Ofcourse there will be some more specialized ships, such as patrol boats to transport smaller units and attack threats near rivers where larger ships have little room.
  They must be produced at dedicated waterborn naval yards, the only effective countermeasures when naval foothold has been lost are artillery from decent range, aircraft can also be a threat if manouvered in properly otherwise they get picked off easely and amphibious vehicles can do decent damage if there are enough of them.
  
  Naval units will not be included in the initial release however, but amphibious ones will.

A full unit list should be available "soon".

summary: Unit types are conventional, as in most other games, but in many cases they need to be micro managed properly in order to be effective.

Unit usage
As already mentioned all combat units require ammo to fire, the ammo is simply mineral(metal) thus shared with your production economy.
Ammo in itself is stored in various buildings, but the primary means is the dedicated supply shack.
It is planned that all units have an internal storage that must be resupplied with trucks, but for different reasons not implemented currently, so currently it is shared with the global pool and will remain so for a good time.
Most units fire fairly accurately, but the accuracy decreases at distance, so it must be considered that when firing over a distance more ammunition is lost.
All units except infantry will also use up fuel, meaning the size of your force must be proportional to the amount of fuel you can produce.
Transport units of various configurations will be able to convey ammo and fuel to units in the field, it is planned that they can be assigned to automatic refill duty.
Once properly implemented it will mean that with an increasing distance a force becomes harder to manage.
Supply lines will have to be established and defended in order to maintain an advance.

I hope this mechanic will make the game tactical and dynamic, without making a it a clutch either.
Summary: Units need to be supplied with ammo and fuel to fight effectively, a careful balance between expenses must be established to win.